Payback's a Witch

by Constance Barker

  Payback's a Witch

  by

  Constance Barker

  Copyright 2019 Constance Barker

  All rights reserved.

  Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine - Alan

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Thanks for Reading

  Catalog of Books

  Chapter One

  Winnie had left to get us coffee over twenty minutes ago. Given that the coffee shop was less than a block away and the time of day, it was something that should have taken her five. She was likely flirting with the barista. On another day I might not be so bothered, but today was the day before the full moon. We had work to do, and I needed my coffee. The broken coffee maker sitting useless in the corner mocked me.

  “You could always get it fixed,” the raven perched on my shoulder cooed at me.

  “You know I can’t do that,” I admonished the raven, Alan. “It’s not from this world, and I’m not going to waste time in the normal world getting a coffee machine fixed.” Every full moon I was able to travel from our world, the paranormal world, also known as Nikatomia, to the normal world. I would then be stuck there until the next full moon when I could come back home. My magic worked in the normal world and in ours, but there were caveats. One was that any normal object, or I supposed being, but I’d never tried that, brought to the paranormal realm couldn’t be touched by magic. Even if I brought it over with me, I couldn’t use magic on it.

  “Then buy a new one,” Alan yawned, bored with the conversation already. He ruffled his coal black feathers. Alan was a grump in the morning without his cup o' joe. Every witch is bonded to a familiar animal at some point in their lives. I supposed I was one of the lucky ones, not having to wait until I was old and gray to meet mine. They were meant to be companions but more than that our familiars made us more powerful.

  “I just might.” I crossed my arms and leaned back in my chair. Alan flew from my shoulder to his perch above my desk. “The coffee in the normal realm is much better than it is here,” I commented.

  “That’s because you don’t have to pluck hairs out of it.”

  “Barry does his best,” I said suddenly protective of the barista that Winnie was probably flirting with at the moment. He was a werewolf and he did try his best, but there was more than one time that a stray hair had made my coffee undrinkable. I grimaced not really craving a cup anymore. I might have to buy a new machine on this next trip.

  “What’s the job?” Alan asked me as if reading my mind. We weren’t telepathic by any means, but our bond did make it easy to understand one another.

  “I don’t know yet.” Usually by now we would have been given a new assignment. We worked between the two realms trying to bring the paranormal back home. I grew up in the normal world, and I knew more than enough ghost stories to know what kind of trouble the residents of the paranormal realm were getting into. Most of the time we were bringing lost people home, ones who stumbled on a portal and didn’t know how to get back. Sometimes we were bringing people here for the first time, those who didn’t realize that they belonged somewhere. It was rare, but sometimes our kind crossed realms to cause turmoil in the normal world. Those were dangerous cases, but we brought them back and our authorities brought them to justice.

  The shiny plaque outside my office read Levana Pike: Cross Realm Detective and under that in smaller letters 100% success rate. I was the best of the best, though I didn’t know of anyone else who did my job. There had to be though, my assignment had to come from somewhere. All I knew was that once a month a letter would come through the pneumatic tube on my desk and I’d know what I had to do next. With the full moon a day away, and no letter, I wasn’t sure if we would even go. I did take walk-ins, work on the side, but no one seemed to be missing anyone or anything of value that they thought might be in the other realm.

  Mainly I worked in what the normal world called Folklore or Legends and they normally crop up in small towns. Some of them originate from a tragedy...murders or natural disasters. Other stories may come from star crossed lovers where one or both die too early and are left to mourn alone. Sometimes the spirit stays quiet or only shows themselves in auras....nothing too spooky. When I'm needed is when the spirit chooses to go loco, stirs up too much hocus pocus in the normal realm and needs subdued and brought back to this world. That's when the assignment comes barreling into my office via the tube.

  “I’m going to see what is taking so long,” I said grabbing my coat from the rack. Peeking into the mirror before heading outside. No amount of makeup could ever hide the pale scar on my cheek. It cut through my tanned skin, its jagged edges the only imperfection on my face. And what an imperfection it was. I could feel people look at me and only see my scar. I tried every spell I knew to heal it, but nothing worked. It was as futile as trying to fix that damned coffee machine. I wiped at it as if that would get rid of it. Between Winnie and I, I couldn’t complain about my small scar. She had lost an eye to a particularly cranky wizard some years back. Somehow, she managed to make eye patches look chic.

  “I like a bit of rough around the edges,” I heard Winnie coo at Barry as soon as I walked in the coffee shop. His cheeks were red, matching the shock of red hair on the top of his head, and over the rest of him. A side effect of lycanthropy was a lot of body hair, even when not in werewolf form.

  “I like a bit of coffee,” I said, standing behind Winnie with my arms crossed.

  “Hey boss!” She smiled brightly. Her eye patch was red today, matching the rest of her outfit. Even her nails were painted red. I had hired Winnie as an assistant a few years back, and now I was training her to become a Cross Realm Detective. She had come in handy more than once on the other side.

  “How about those coffees?” I asked.

  “They’re ready, Ms. Pike,” Barry said, still blushing. I hated when he called me that, it made me feel old, when I was only a couple years older than he and Winnie.

  “It’s Vana,” I reminded him. He nodded, though I knew he would still call me Ms. Pike. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “What work?” Winnie crossed her arms stubbornly. “Last I checked we didn’t have an assignment yet.”

  “The full moon is in a day,” Barry said surprised. “Are you going to cross over even without an assignment?” He looked at Winnie with hope in his eyes. A month was a long time to be away. I was used to it, but I didn’t have anyone to come back to.

  “I have a feeling we’re going to get an assignment any minute now.” The feeling had gotten stronger as the day continued. I had only been doing this a few years, but that was enough assignments to know how it worked. A last-minute assignment only meant more danger, and less time to prepare for it. The last time I had gotten an assignment this close to the full moon was when I got my scar.

  “Are you
sure?” Winnie asked, noticing how serious I was.

  “We need to get ready to cross,” I nodded. We needed to prepare for anything. The assignment would come with only enough time to get across the portal, not enough to pick and choose what we brought with us.

  “Thank you for the coffee, Barry,” Winnie said with a wink. “And the conversation.” She took the coffees from his hands and passed one to me. There were three, though one was Raven sized.

  “No problem, Winnie,” he stammered. I rolled my eyes at the two of them and left. With Winnie it was hard to tell who she actually liked and who she was just flirting with for the fun of it.

  “You ought to be careful with that boy,” I warned. “I don’t want him hurt.” I felt older than my twenty-seven years, almost maternal when it came to both Winnie and Barry. She could act like such a child it was hard to not mother her sometimes.

  “I like Barry.” I gave her a look, but she seemed sincere, so I dropped it.

  “Finally.” Alan cawed and flew over to us. He took his coffee in his beak and flew with it over to my desk. It was an odd thing to watch, a raven drinking coffee. Odd enough that even I wasn’t used to the sight. After he dipped his beak in a few times he looked at us. “Thank goodness...Barry must not be shedding today. Oh, a letter came.”

  “An assignment?” I pulled my coat off and hung it on the coat rack. Its dull brown was made even duller by Winnie’s bright red tailor-fitted jacket. I marched to the desk and opened the tube to pull out the piece of parchment.

  “What is it?” Winnie asked as I read it over. I had to read it a few times before I could answer her. This was a dangerous one, more dangerous than we had taken on in a long time. It was one I had heard of when I was a little girl living in the normal world. It struck fear into my heart then and it did now as well.

  “The Hatchet Man,” I read off the parchment. I knew it wouldn’t mean much to her or to Alan. Neither of them had ever lived in the normal realm, so they didn’t know the legend. This job wasn’t something I fell into accidentally, my obsession with urban legends and folklore started long before I even knew about the paranormal realm or my own powers.

  “Sounds spooky.” Winnie clapped her hands together in excitement. The spookier, the more dangerous and even the more gruesome was all the better in her mind. You’d never expect her fascination with the darker side of humanity from the way she looked. I’d always found that you could tell absolutely nothing about a person from the way they looked.

  “Are you going to tell us who the hatchet man is?” Alan asked. He had flown over to rest on my shoulder, a reason that I never wore sleeveless tops.

  “It’s a legend I heard a few times as a child,” I started to explain.

  “What legend didn’t you hear?” Winnie snorted.

  “Probably many,” I shrugged. “There are thousands of them, as we know some of them are true. At least partially. There are some that I hope aren’t true and the hatchet man is certainly one of them.” Winnie, impatient with my explanation grabbed the parchment from my hands. She didn’t often see the messages that came in, so she was surprised by its brevity.

  “It literally just says ‘the hatchet man’.” She turned the message to show the paper to both me and Alan, as if we hadn’t both been looking at it a moment before. “Are all our assignments this brief?”

  “Sometimes,” I nodded.

  “Who gives us these anyways?”

  “No idea,” I shrugged. “The hatchet man is a particularly vengeful spirit. He’s not lost with no way to come home. He’s there by choice and we’ll need to force him to come back, and hand him over to law enforcement. From the legends, he’s been terrorizing his town since before he died. This won’t be easy.”

  “Sounds like a piece of work,” Winnie sighed. “Why are we only taking care of him now?”

  “Yeah, it sounds like he’s been a problem for a while,” Alan agreed with a flap of his wings. I didn’t ask many questions about our assignments – there wasn’t anyone to ask since our boss was a mystery. I only knew what we were told and not much more. Alan and Winnie were more curious than I was. Maybe I should be but I also know that curiosity can sometimes get you killed...or worse, cursed.

  “I think we’ll find that out when we get there,” I said. “We’ve got a bit of time to prepare, and we’ll need every second. We’ll also need to rest up before we cross over. I’ve got a feeling this one will take all our tricks.”

  Chapter Two

  The rules of travel between realms were simple. You could only travel on the full moon, unless you planned on a very short trip, you had to remain until the next one. It was more pleasant to travel when the moon was at its highest point. Going over earlier or later than that was possible, but it would result in uncomfortable side effects. Dizziness, stomach aches and headaches were common with inter-realm travel, but never worse than if you pass when the moon wasn’t at its highest point.

  I only knew of one portal, but logically there had to be others. Stories like mushrooms in a perfect circle, also called fairy rings led me to think so. They could be stumbled on accidentally, anywhere. I am of the belief that they come and go as they please. We were only lucky that ours hadn’t disappeared. Our passage wasn’t as pretty or whimsical as a fairy ring. It was called the Big Tunnel, and the main passageway between our world and the other world. It was an old train route that cut through Indiana.

  “Is the moon high yet?” Winnie asked me. We stood at the mouth of the tunnel, waiting for the right moment.

  “Not quite.” I squinted at the moon. “Alan, fly up to get a closer look.” I raised my shoulder for the bird to take flight. He would be able to tell if it was at its highest point. Winnie and I could only guess.

  We tried to pack light on our journeys, only bringing what was absolutely necessary. This time around we were laden down with large bags. I wanted us to be prepared for anything, which meant that we had a lot of baggage this time. The question that Alan and Winnie posed about why the assignment on the hatchet man came now had been nagging at me. I had more than just a bad feeling about it.

  “It’s time,” Alan squawked as he flew back to my shoulder. I hoisted my bag up and readied myself for the journey. Winnie did the same, with the point of her heel she drew a spiral in the dirt in front of us. Facing left the spiral was meant to banish evil spirits and protect us against harm.

  “This shield will protect against evil. This shield will keep out harm. This shield does not allow any demon nor enemy to pass through. This shield is mine and mine alone. No darkness shall pass through this shield,” Winnie and I chanted together. It was a simple spell of protection to keep whatever evil or darkness lurking between the two worlds at bay. Worse than any evil we might face on the other side, was the evil in between. Lost souls lived there.

  “Ready?” Winnie nodded and the three of us walked into the tunnel.

  As we moved through, the tunnel morphed. The walls disintegrated leaving nothing but pure blackness. I could easily see how someone could get lost on the way through. If we stepped into the darkness, we’d never find our way back. We had to follow the train tracks underneath our feet. Our concentration couldn’t be broken, or the tracks might disappear like the walls.

  Screams ripped through the blackness. The screams of those who had gone adrift in the tunnel. I wondered if a fairy ring would be so tumultuous to travel through or if it might even be pleasant as the name suggested. The screams threatened to break my concentration as my foot nearly slipped from the wooden track below me. Winnie grabbed my arm to steady me. That was as close a call as I ever wanted. My heartbeat pounded against my chest, almost loudly enough to drown out the screaming. I could never quite shake those screams though, not even after we left the tunnel. Each time I felt like I brought them with me. It was the least they deserved, those poor lost souls. I wanted to help them. Maybe some day I'd figure out a way to do just that. But for now, I had an assignment to get to.

  Alan sl
ipped into the breast pocket of my jacket, so he wouldn’t get lost. Time didn’t exist in the tunnel. It felt like hours, even days passed when it was only a few minutes. Just as panic started to set in, we got through to the other side.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” I breathed a sigh of relief. There was never complete certainty that we would make it through. Many got lost going through, whether they were from the paranormal or normal realm. It was one of the reasons we had to do our job. When one of our own got stuck on the other side they needed help getting back over.

  “I think I would feel more confident if you didn’t act so surprised every time we survived going through.” Winnie brushed dust from her jacket and tugged it down. Bright yellow today, and an eye patch painted like a sunflower to match.

  “I don’t want any of us getting too confident,” I admitted. Confidence could kill you, where caution could save your life. I never wanted any of us to get to a point where we thought we could go across easily or alone.

  “We’re through?” Alan poked his head out of my pocket. He was a rather large bird to be inside of such a small space. A simple enlargement spell fixed that issue, making my pockets much larger than they appeared.

  “We made it,” I assured him. He was even more scared of the tunnel than I was. After confirming that we were in fact in Indiana, he jumped out and went back onto my shoulder.

  “Where’s the hatchet man, again?” Winnie asked. I didn’t know why I bothered prepping her, she forgot everything I told her as soon as I finished saying it.

  “Not too far this time.” A drawback of the portal was that we might need to get all the way across the country for our assignment. Luckily travel as a witch wasn’t too difficult, but it was still easier to be close to the job. “Just a state over, Township Road 56 in Ohio.”

  “That’s specific.”

  “Would you rather I'd been vague?” I asked. My head pounded from the trip across. I could tell by looking at her that Winnie’s stomach was aching. Her skin was paler than usual, and beads of sweat were dripping from her forehead. I didn’t think Alan was capable of headaches, though it didn’t stop him from complaining about discomfort after traveling through the realms.